A few Tweets

I joined Twitter at the end of December 2011 because I realized that I was using my computer less and less, and my smart phone more and more, relatively speaking — and I was using my phone to find and read content that intrigued me. I plan to use my Twitter account almost as a note-taking service — I will tweet news articles, etc., that intrigue me and that I might want to come back to later.

My account is @aaron_sterling, and you can see it in the rightmost column of this blog. Here are three items that are good examples of things I found interesting, but which, after today, I won’t be “elevating” to the status of a blog entry.

The computer security company McAfee has produced a document titled 2012 Threat Predictions (pdf file). I skipped over some of it, but the parts I read were fascinating. For example, they see BitCoin as an extremely insecure currency, they believe illegal spam will diminish and be replaced by “legal spam” (equally annoying), and they think far more attackers will target hardware exploits instead of the traditional software exploits. Worth a look.

Enrique Zabala has produced a Flash animation that explains Rijndael/AES visually. It is beautiful.

Rajarshi Guha and co-authors are designing a type-ahead chemical substructure search engine. This addresses a longstanding open problem in cheminformatics, which is: searching for chemicals in a database is slow (in worst case probably exponential because the Subgraph Isomorphism Problem is NP-complete), but can it be made faster? At least for important special cases, this tool seems to be competitive in speed with Google’s type-ahead search engine for other content: it provides the chemist suggestions, given the prefix of the input available, before the chemist even hits the enter key.